"I started last summer and I didn't really talk about it. It was very incognito, my name and everything, but I decided to talk about it [now]. I think it's a positive thing, especially for girls to see that you can still continue to educate yourself and you can still be fabulous and fierce and celebrate your femininity," she told MTV News while promoting her new fashion website, TypeF.com.

Banks hopes that by putting a face to those fiercely educated young ladies, they'll also feel empowered. "I think a lot of girls think it's either/or, even at my age, I feel that it's never too late to continue your education," she explained. "I can't just rely only on my gut. I have to have the knowledge that my professors have in order to take it to the next level."

With her successful reality show, "America's Next Top Model," still a hit, and all of that school work on her schedule, Banks is adding one more job to her r ésumé: novelist.

"I'm actually writing a book right now and it comes out in September. ... I'm writing a book called 'Model Land' and it comes out this fall in September and it's about a modeling academy on the top of this mountain in the middle of the town called Matopia. And in order to get this school to become an "intoxicbella" — that's what I'm calling supermodels in the book that have superpowers — you have to have very narrowly defined beauty, very cookie-cutter," she teased, adding that there are some female characters in the three-part series who shake things up.

"Four girls find themselves in this school that are not supposed to be there at all," she said. "And over the course of the book, they change what beauty means across the world."